I don’t understand why you added this to the end of your post. How are your feelings and experiences related to what I said? No, I’m not being awkward, this is a genuine question. 
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Yes, because you claimed that dreams might be unconscious rather than conscious.
I said it was an interesting approach.
However, I think I disagree because I experience feelings while dreaming. Therefore, I have to be conscious.
Are we the simulator of the dream? Is the ‘act of dreaming’, as the experiencer, or as the simulator?
An answer to this may upgrade our interpretation.
No, I don’t think it is a simulator.
The person dreaming is experiencing something that has been experienced previously. At least, this is how dreams work, I guess.
A simulation would mean that someone or something is “manipulating” my dreams.
Not even in the more lucid or odd ones.
I honestly believe that dreams are a very personal feature of the human mind.
Yes, I suppose you’re correct.
Maybe it’s as an ‘interpreter’ from the experiencer’s position.
We can either think dreams are random phenomena, for pleasure, or their content is a strength of brain.
And I think you are correct in your approach too.
I like how you state that dreams are random phenomena.
However, when I have read about this topic, some authors and scientists claim that dreams are also based upon daytime residue. Our minds flag important events which will be likely to be processed in the dreams at night.
Although that may be completely true, I am hesitant to believe that if I commit for the day to dream at night, that’s how it will be. It would be odd, but not impossible!
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While I don’t imagine that this is the be-all end-all answer, it seems very much like dreaming is a way to engage in cognitive practice and organization of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, etc. while our normal awareness is turned off. We feel anxious, our brain practices our anxiety, and we dream of being naked at work. When I was 15, I worked as a dishwasher, and I’d dream annoyingly mundane dreams about washing dishes. I vaguely recall a study where they made people play Tetris before sleep, and people overwhelmingly had Tetris dreams.
One thing that seems common to dreams is that our “reality testing” goes away. People sometimes muse “maybe this is a dream”, but usually we don’t wonder this during a dream, and when we do, we instantly find we are lucid dreaming.
My hypothesis would be that if my brain feels a need to practice something mundane, simple and repetitive, then that’s what the dream is. Often, my brain feels the need to practice something abstract, and engages with my imagination, creating some sort of crazy dream world with crazy dream logic.
Thanks, I think I understand you better now. It’s kind of a curious point – what is the “background info” we take with us into dreams, and could a dream be background info for us in waking life? I’m inclined to say that, since so many of my dreams are infinite variations on a few common themes, I really am aware of them in some important sense, in waking life. Maybe not the specifics of Variation 10.546, which I haven’t had yet, but the main points and tensions anyway.
Yes, a good question. Does a possible “self-awareness factor” contribute to this? I’m not sure whether we should construe “conscious,” in your example of me dreaming about replying, to mean “consciously aware” or more like just “aware as in background info.” If “consciously aware,” I could easily see how that would add some sparkle.
I find it interesting that the same questions can be raised about waking life: Am I “aware of” or “conscious of” what I just had for dinner? My best shot at an answer would be: Not until someone brings it up (or I have reason to think about it). Till then, it’s background info, or a background belief perhaps. But I would have no problem extending “conscious of” to include such things too, if that’s philosophically helpful; we just have to agree what we want the term to encompass.
That’s very interesting, indeed.
I didn’t know there could be a third part here. The one who brings up that we are dining or who says this is all a dream. I hardly remember the interaction with another awareness-mind in a dream. As I stated previously, I think dreams are very personal, and depend a lot on the mind’s residue of the dreamer. It would be mind-blowing if a third part may enter into my dreams just to warn me that everything around me is not real, because we are in a dream. This reminds me of Paprika. It is a Japanese anime film. I recommend it to you; I guess you would like it.
On the other hand, do you think that the background info or background belief may help us to have more lucid dreams?
I’ve found the best way to approach the subjects, or narratives of our dreams is to focus on the emotional, or mental state that it represents. I too have recurring dreams about my childhood home. But many different things happen there in different dreams.
Firstly, there is the emotional feeling of being at home, this is like a place of refuge, my primary place of familiarity, of identity, over time.
So for me it is my bedroom in my childhood home. From here many things are acted out in dreams, although if there are other people, or family members in the dream, it is not set in my bedroom, but other rooms in the house, each with a slightly different significance, or frequency of use. This also applies to the garden, or street, with different places having different significance.
The people, pets, animals, or creatures in the dreams, also have different relevances.
You say you have a recurring dream about being in the lift. I have a similar recurrence (my most frequent dream), of exploring my attic and finding secret passages, or little unknown rooms. Or going out onto the roof and finding special places. But like with your lift, or your front door, there is always a limit, a blockage, beyond which I can never go.
What is going on here is something about exploring your identity, is it developed over your childhood. There are emotional states linked to each place, or event. But also constraints, thresholds, fears, places beyond which you will, or cannot go.
For me, my special places in the attic were places of refuge, from the scary world outside, what I was fearful, or uncertain about. Or from my farther, who was very strict and could be fierce, or aggressive. Or alternatively, I was like an explorer, finding new exciting places, to show to my family, to show I am capable, or can contribute to the family. Or, a way to branch out on my own, create my own identity.
Then there is the family politics, tensions, fears. Which are acted out in the house and grounds. One can identity and interpret this emotional and subjective landscape and learn to read what aspects of one’s emotional identity are brought forward into the dream. Their significance in what is going on and to understand how these shape how you act, or react to events in the dream.
Also, I have lucid dreams relating to my bedroom, sometimes, as it happens, I open the window and sort of fly out into the garden, or just look out and focus on how real it is. To feel the breeze, the presence of the trees and space over the lawn.
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You feel (
) that you can’t have feelings unless you’re conscious? That also is interesting. I think I disagree, but it’s interesting, and now I will spend a little while considering this…
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Yep. That’s exactly my position on the topic. 
Yes, we could get literal about it, and point out that — as far as we know — feelings emerge from the so-called unconscious mind, but I think this matter requires more nunace from us than that kind of debater’s nit-picking.
My view remains that our feelings are very deeply embedded, while consciousness — the conscious mind — overlays the rest of the mind (in our view, rather than in actuality?), and is at the not-deeply-embedded end of the scale.
I doubt that feelings are directly connected to consciousness, but I have no formal argument to offer in justification. Maybe a little more thought and consideration will help…
I think an example may help us to sort through our thoughts and ideas.
Imagine that I accidentally burn myself with a hot pot.
When I burn myself, I feel pain, right? Well, I think this is a “trigger” or indication to my consciousness that something happened just a moment ago, and this event caused me to feel something. Therefore, I am conscious that it hurts because I got burned touching the hot pot.
A dream is much like an event horizon, such as ‘burning oneself with a hot pot’.
I suggested previously that we are light source in the Dreamworld.
We are conscious in dreams, but less conscious. We are most conscious when awake.
Our unconscious is not the source of our biology; our subconscious affects our biology; our consciousness is in sync with our biology.
Our births occured, and because of this we have biological life, a semi-subconscious and full-conscious effect.
Our unconscious self is completely off. When we go to sleep, our consciousness slips passed the unconscious to create a dream (a simulator simulating an experience of an interpreter).
Basically I’m suggesting our unconscious is nothing but a state of being off.
I disagree.
I honestly believe that there is some consciousness while dreaming. Perhaps it is not a full state of consciousness, but I don’t think it gets unplugged when you go to sleep.
Furthermore, I also believe that it is a pattern that we can’t fully control. You go to sleep, and then you dream. Sometimes you experience it vividly, others don’t. What I want to explain is that our mind is still operating.
However, dreams are tricky because we don’t always remember what we dreamt the previous night. I guess this is why you think that we become unconscious while sleeping.
This issue is sometimes phrased as “Do I experience a dream in the present tense?” Or is our experience always “I dreamed . . .” because we are unconscious when we dream?
I wish I could strap more stuff on my dreamer-body, and stay in the dream world.
I’m going to try strap as many things made out of light source on my dreamer-body, as I can, to make the dream realer.
I assume you can do this by setting the mind before sleep.
If this is a paradox, I’m deeply sorry because I am very bad at solving and understanding them!
On the other hand, I think we can use present tense to state that we are conscious of a dream. For example, I can say to myself, “I dream of sitting on the bed of my old house,” because, while dreaming, I’m aware that the place is no longer my house, so obviously it has to be a dream.
I’ve been recording particularly memorable dreams for many years; I have a database of ~800 dreams. So I feel well placed to make some observations on the nature of dreams.
The OP talks about being oneself, or being multiple people, the dreamer and the person in the dream…In my experience there are many different forms the self can take in dreams, and it can change during the dream.
For instance I might start a dream feeling like a spectator, as if I am watching events on TV. Then I’m now an active agent within the events of the dream – almost always without noticing the shift of course.
In terms of consciousness too, I’ve found there are basically 4 flavors –
1 - behaving as you would in the real world, if those events were really happening
2 - your decisions are part of the narrative; you make decisions that you wouldn’t do in real life (this is often linked to “just knowing” things like “I am a ghost”)
3 - lucid dream
4 - game dream – you are aware that the events are not real, but you also don’t realize you’re dreaming.
In terms of the question of whether you can dream of things you haven’t experienced: not in any of my dreaming.
And I’d say that dreaming of Australia say is not convincing, because I am aware of a few things about australia, my imagination can riff on that.
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